About WAD

Since 20 years Weiterbildungsakademie gGmbH Dresden (WAD) successfully coaches students from the application process through medical and commercial education to to their career entry. Every year WAD teaches 500 students social and professional skills with the goal of a high job placement rate for their graduates. At the medical school 3000 physical and occupational therapists as well as other medical professionals and therapists get educated.

Challenge

During the theoretical part of their education WAD students get introduced to various office applications and other relevant software. They learn working with these applications in dedicated computer labs in order to get prepared for their professional careers in the best possible way. But the big and bulky PCs meant mainly one thing – noise. In addition many PCs were placed under the students’ tables, hardware components failed ever more often and most systems had reached the end of their life cycles. The schools management team was looking for innovative solutions to implement a modern teaching concept for their computer classrooms to be planned and rolled out by an IT partner.

WAD was facing serious challenges. On the one hand teaching quality had to be improved through technology. At the same time budget restrictions for hardware acquisition and management had to be met.

Implementation

One of the requirements was a quiet, functional and learning-friendly environment in the classroom. For the implementation WAD chose the consulting skills and long standing experience of system integrator ditpro. Being well aware of these challenges, WAD and ditpro decided for NComputing’s vSpace solution for desktop virtualization and L300 Thin Clients. NComputing, Inc. is the fastest growing desktop virtualization company in the world, with more than 50,000 customers and 20 million daily users in 140 countries. NComputing’s innovative and award-winning technology gives customers an impressively quick time-to-value, extremely high performance, and the most affordable desktop virtualization solution available today. L300 is a cost effective solution with low power consumption in a small form factor that can easily be deployed.

It can be quickly mounted to a screen or desk. With only about 25% of the cost of traditional desktop PCs the Numo System on Chip (SoC) based L300 clients cost less than other Thin or Zero client solutions. A virtual Microsoft Windows Server with remote desktop services provides the software applications at WAD.

Result

WAD aquired NComputing’s Thin Clients at a fraction (~25%) of the cost compared to traditional desktop PCs. In addition the new virtualized infrastructure doesn’t get outdated as quickly as PCs increasing the lifecycle. L300 can be easily mounted behind the monitors, giving students and teachers more moving space in the classroom.

L300 Thin Clients have no moving parts and meet the cutomer request for low maintenance cost and failure rate. All applications get installed and updated on a central server. Only one server needs to be managed instead of 27 individual PCs which dramatically reduces costs/efforts. This solution helps WAD to save energy costs with L300 consuming around 5 Watt compared to up to 200 Watt of their old PCs.

Summary

WAD’s challenge for a modern teaching concept, low acquisition and service cost were successfully mastered by System Integrator ditpro for the good of students and teachers.